[Tango-L] heads up

[Alexis Cousein]

On 22/06/2011 21:48, HBBOOGIE1 at aol.com wrote:
> Jack
> Perhaps you didn't understand the  questions.
>
> 1. how can you dance with balance, on axis and with good  posture if your
> head is looking down at the floor?

My take on it (given that my previous post seems to have been
ambiguous enough to attract invectives and protestations) is that
it's largely irrelevant, which means...

> 2. Can anyone explain the  benefit of dancing this way?

...that there's also little benefit (and in some embraces
looks plainly daft).

In some embraces it doesn't look too daft unless you mean
you're looking on the floor *right below you*.

Taken at extremes, there's only one infinitesimally small
position of the head that is neither looking up nor looking
down, so you're either looking up or down in some small
fashion with probability 1. Looking down too much can look
stupid, but so can looking up at the ceiling.

There is one danger in "looking down", and that is when it's
coupled with hiding your centre, making it impossible to
lead "desde el alma". But I've seen people who were leading
with the chest even though they were looking down in a rather
ungainly way.

Looking at some videos, I seem to be looking at the height of
my partner's face in open embrace some of the time, which
means looking down if the follower is a lot smaller than I am.
At other times I look level. It also seems to depend slightly
on navigation when there are lots of people around.

In close embrace I either look level or have my head arranged so
that it touches the followers, with the tilt depending on the
height of the partner and the exact embrace (which is
negotiated - it seems I'm not particularly fussy in enforcing
the One Embrace to Rule Them All with all the followers I dance
with).

Go figure...looking at it, I don't think there is, again,
an immutable Correct Way that requires people to reach for
the pitchforks to enforce it. If it looks good and it works,
then it looks good and it works, and if it doesn't,...